Paul HollywoodReviews

A lot of good recipes and he has the regular measures to make it easier on those of use who don't use grams!

I wasted no time in experimenting with this cookbook!

Paul Hollywood's Bake, My best ever recipes for the classics, arrived today, and the cherry cake above is already out of the oven and cooling down for a sweet something after dinner. It's the easiest cake I've ever made: you bung all the ingredients except the cherries and the almonds into the Kenwood, and when you've blitzed the batter you fold in three quarters of the cherries, and then you press the rest of them and the almonds into the top of the batter.

(The eagle-eyed reader will notice that the pantry held only slivered almonds instead of whole blanched almonds and a mixture of red and green glace cherries, but necessity is the mother of invention as they say.)

As you'd expect from Paul Hollywood, judge of The Great British Baking Show, there is a bit of yada-yada at the beginning, but the main message is that it's easy, you can do it yourself, and people will love you for it .

Next time you go round to someone's house, bake a cake or a loaf of bread and take it with you instead of a bottle of wine or some chocolates. There's nothing like making something yourself. The processes involved, the fact that you can share the experience with your kids and family, it creates those all-important precious, lasting memories. (p.11)

It's true, isn't it? There's just something about baking... I love it when my best friend comes for dinner bearing a tarte tatin. Her husband loves it when I bring a batch of blueberry muffins for breakfast when we go on shared holidays. The Offspring loves my apple tart, which just like my mother's version, is packed with fruit and not too sweet. And The Spouse's favourite is my orange and almond cake... but it could be that there are some challengers in this cookbook...

Chapter 1: Cakes

• Chocolate Orange Banana Bread. I have four bananas, they just need to a bit squishier and then I'm trying the recipe.


• Victoria Sandwich: interesting to see that he uses half butter/half margarine. I have some lovely posh jams for the filling... see the photo here


• Sticky Ginger Loaf: golden syrup and black treacle! And cloves!!


• Cherry Cake: I chose this one to do first because we had all the ingredients in the pantry, more or less.


• Chocolate Hazelnut Torte : this one is a definite for a dinner party, it looks impressive but is really easy.


• Carrot cake: I will need to master the art of piping cream to make it look the way it is in the photo, but the actual cake is simple. It uses wholemeal flour so we can pretend that it's healthy.


• Lemon Drizzle Cake... yes, when our lemon tree stops sulking and produces some fruit. (Ok, maybe I did prune it too hard, but still...)


• Chocolate Fudge Cake: three layers of total decadence, see the photo and recipe here


• New York Chocolate Brownie Cheesecake... to die for.


• Fruits of the Forest Cheesecake: the most demanding of the recipes, and I'm not quite sure what he means by frozen 'forest fruits'. Berries??

Plus there are recipes for Blueberry Muffins, Chocolate Brownies, and Blondies.

(You will have noticed that there are four cake recipes with chocolate.)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/11/25/bake-by-paul-hollywood/

I suppose that it is best to begin with a confession: my wife and I are huge, long-time fans of The Great British Baking Show and Paul Hollywood is a big reason for that. As the judge that all the contestants fear the most—and are most eager to win the approval of with a coveted “Hollywood Handshake”—he shows himself time and again to be knowledgeable about all things related to baking as well as a master of execution in the culinary arts. So, when it comes to evaluating a cookbook that promises to include Hollywood’s favorite, time-tested recipes for a wide variety of classic bakes, I am more than a little biased before I even begin.

That acknowledged, BAKE is a remarkable collection of outstanding and tantalizing recipes. The thing about the book that is most impressive is the diversity of its coverage. Unlike the bread-centric focus of some of the author’s previous cookbooks—baking bread is his passion, after all—this is a far more balanced selection, including dishes from a broad set of sweet and savory categories that cover just about anything a home baker might want to cook, including Cakes, Cookies and Scones, Breads and Flatbreads, Pizza and Doughnuts, Pastry and Pies, and Desserts. All of the recipes are easy to follow and I really appreciate that the weights and measures were tailored to the U.S. audience. Also, at the head of each category, as well as before each recipe, the author offers lovely personal observations that are both insightful and frequently charming.

For what it is worth, we baked three of the recipes from different categories: Peanut Butter Cookies, White Sandwich Bread, and Yule Log. So, in addition to reading all these great preparations and imagining how wonderful they might be on the plate, we have first-hand experience with how a few of them actually turned out. They were all fun and satisfying to bake and ended up being delicious. However, our bakes were not uniformly successful—without the right pan for the Yule Log we over-cooked the sponge, which ended up being more of a Yule Parfait, but it was still quite tasty. Also, the bread came out great and exactly as described, but was very time-consuming given the required dough-rising and proving. Overall, BAKE is a cookbook that should be an essential resource for any home baker and it is one that we will enjoy using for many years to come.½

Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

I think most fans of the GBBO are familiar with Paul Hollywood. He's the tougher judge, but his recipes always look amazing.

In Bake, the recipes all look great! The pictures (There is a picture for EVERY recipe and even some that have step-by-step pictures accompanying it) are beautiful and really sell the food more. I love that each recipe is very well written and easily instructed, plus it has cups and weights for those who use a scale.

So many different categories here, too. Cakes, cookies, breads, pizza, doughnuts, pastry, pies, and other desserts. I can't wait to make the Chocolate Fudge Cake, the chocolate brownies, Paul's biscotti recipe, and my own pizza dough.

This is better then a Paul Hollywood handshake, because he tells you how to bake bread just like he does. It covers everything from regular white bread to naan bread which requires a special oven. I'm going to give baking white bread a try, and if it goes well I'll branch out to his more exotic breads.

Fun to read these recipes and the commentary by Paul Hollywood. Some of the ingredients (as well as the metric measurements) are unfamiliar to US bakers, and the hardware may not be commonly available, but it is great to think about making some of these bakes.

Introduction
A Baker's Guide
Biscuits & Traybakes
Breads
Cakes
Sweet Pastry & Patisserie
Savoury Bakes
Puddings & Desserts

The baker's guide is helpful, but there is no conversion table, which would have been helpful for American bakers. Temperatures are given in C and F but measurements are all in metric, so you'll need to do the conversions or use a digital scale.

The photography is beautiful. Most (but not all) recipes have a photo. Between the recipes are one-page (seven questions) interviews with the bakers.

Interested in making:
Irish Brack (p. 82)
Sunday Tea Lemon Curd Swiss Roll (152)
Choux Caramel Puffs (203)
Mary's Chocolate Orange Tart (224)

Classics
Chocolate
Bakers' Favorites
Fruit & Nut
Free-From (e.g. gluten free, vegan, etc.)

An absolutely beautiful book, luscious to look at. I made the Victoria sponge (p. 25) and it came out perfectly, though I did need to add a tablespoon or two of milk to the buttercream (as the online recipe suggests: https://www.pbs.org/food/recipes/marys-victoria-sandwich/). For self-rising flour, I used 1 1/2 tsp baking powder and 1/4 tsp salt per cup of flour.

Everything in here looks tempting; I'm planning to make the Pear & Hazelnut Cake (p.168) and perhaps a few others: the Layered Coffee Cake (p. 149) and the Blackberry Pound Cake (p. 182). The Chocolate Pinata Cake (p. 103) would be an ambitious but very fun birthday cake, too...

*

Update February 2020: Made pear & hazelnut cake, VERY good - actually better the second day (first day, the cake was a bit dry, but the pear and frosting make up for it).

The Great British Bake Off:Get Baking for Friends and Family
by The Bake Off Team / Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith
2018
Sphere Books
5.0 / 5.0

I became obsessed with this series on Netflix years ago, and have watched it ever since. Every season the contestants are fun and interesting people, people you enjoy getting to know through their baking talents. Their baking innovations and talents are off the charts- they create some amazing (and, now and then, a not so amazing) desserts. Baking takes precision, vision, talent and a lot of patience. Paul and Prue are the perfect match to judge these creations. They aim to help the baker reach their goal and become better bakers, they come up with some amazing challenges for these bakers. Although I have my favorites every season, I find all the bakers to be inspiring in different ways.
This cookbook features cakes, birthday cakes, torts, tarts and all kinds of sweet and savory dessert ideas and recipes, with over 100 mouth watering photographs.....I´m not sure I will ever be able to imitate these bakers, but it will be fun to try.

Paul Hollywood's favorite British bakes, divided by region. The introductions talk about how differences in climate, crops, and finances has created varied baking traditions for each region and are all very interesting and enlightening and I wished for more in-depth information, but this is a cookbook after all, not a history book. The recipes are great - very British - and the illustrations, especially the technique ones, are extremely helpful as "fairly wet dough" is a somewhat loose description. Note that many of the recipes take some experimenting with because US ingredients, especially flour, are different from British, but it's not difficult to get good results.½

Looking forward to baking some of the breads in particular - I have used a couple of recipes reproduced on the internet, with success, as Hollywood makes sure that each step is fully explained.

Great little book with some very useful tips and tricks to help produce that perfect loaf. Provides a very wide spectrum of different bread recipes to try. The Cheese and Onion Soda bread has become a very firm favorite in my house. Highly recommended.

I borrowed this book from a colleague, mainly to see if it was worth buying. Whilst there were a couple of good recipes, many were ones I already had in other cookery books so it wasn't worth the expenditure.

For someone new to baking however, this is a good introductory book and I actually think it is better laid-out than the previous GBBO book.

I like the look of the breads in this book, but I suspect there are a number of errors as we have made a few really wrong breads from it. The conversion from metric is also not trivial. This book is good for inspiration is you already know how to bake and can figure out the recipe quantities on your own from experience.

I know most people don't find bread very exciting, but you'd expect a cookbook about it to at least make an effort. Disappointing, but that's the risk you take when ordering sight unseen.

unusual breads